Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

There are three men who served as governor of Iowa for fewer than two months. One of them pinballed between state and local government after sitting in the big chair. According to the U of I’s Biographical Dictionary of Iowa:

Leo Elthon of Fertile, in Worth County, was a state senator who won election as lieutenant governor in 1952. Governor and lieutenant governor were independent of each other at the time, and terms were only two years long, and he ran again in 1954. But before the earlier term ended, Gov. William Beardsley died in a car accident.

“Elthon served as governor of Iowa for 52 days (the only governor to succeed to the office due to the death of his predecessor), and was then reinaugurated as lieutenant governor,” the Biographical Dictionary says. Those 52 days earned Elthon a place in the governors list and a State of the State address he didn’t have to worry about fulfilling!

After Elthon served his second term as lieutenant governor, he became mayor of Fertile and then returned to the Iowa Senate.

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS

Dear Santa:

Don’t bring me new dishes; I don’t need a new kind of game.
Genealogists have peculiar wishes; for Christmas I just want a surname.

A new washing machine would be great, but it’s not the desire of my life.
I’ve just found an ancestor’s birth date; what I need now is the name of his wife.

My heart doesn’t yearn for a ring, that would put a real diamond to shame.
What I want is a much cheaper thing; please give me Mary’s last name.

To see my heart singing with joy, don’t bring me a red leather suitcase.
Bring me a genealogist’s toy: A surname, with dates and place.

Wyoming Co. PA Pioneers via Clark County Genealogical Society, 1984. Reprinted in the November 1985 newsletter (PDF) of the Warren County Genealogical Society. The WCGS archives have been digitized.

I said it was going to happen. I just thought it would take a little longer. According to census estimates, Utah has 5000 people more than Iowa.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Iowa was the 10th-largest state in the country. Twelve decades later, it won’t make the top 30. (If only Amazon would have been interested in creating 25,000 jobs somewhere that desperately wanted them…)

Although it wasn’t the fastest-growing state this time — “only” third, percentage-wise — Utah has the second-highest fertility rate in the country, and even that is at replacement rate.

The main growth in Utah (PDF), like everywhere else in the country, is around an urban area, in this case Salt Lake City and, to a lesser extent, Provo.

Falling into the fourth quintile of population has one more side effect: For the next two Congresses, Iowa won’t be the state with the highest number of people per House district (in multi-member states). Utah also has four seats.